Manchester Museum reveals part two of the renovation of its Alfred Waterhouse designed Grade II* listed gallery tomorrow.

Nature’s Library occupies the first floor mezzanine over the Living Worlds space – the lower floor which was itself overhauled two years ago from the traditional Mammal Gallery into an interactive, accessible collection where nature, art and culture meet.

Accessibility has been the buzz word for Nature’s Library, too; it’s cleverly bookended by cabinets full of critical taxidermy, geology and collecting paraphernalia from the museum’s four million-strong archive with thousands of items in between that more artfully tell the story of the natural world and how man (often specific men who brought items back for the museum) has used it, manipulated it and conserved it.

“It’s nice to bring people into this story,” says curator David Gelsthorpe. “Everybody goes and collects shells on a beach, and we’ve got one of the best natural history collection in the UK to tell the story of collecting with.

“This gallery is only part of the offer. We’ll be having handling tables, a comprehensive programme of after hours events where we get samples out, and then study sessions where anybody can come in and say, ‘We want to see the rest of your extinct birds’, and we’ll make that happen for them.”

Reorganising the space, says David, has allowed him to bring out some never before shown items from the collection. Among them, an astonishing 400 million year-old horned trilobite, a family of penguin skeletons and a fossilised flower (one of only five ever found).

But there’s also endless curiosities: a hanging two-toed sloth, a giant ground pangolin, a preserved octopus, Victorian animal dioramas and a half-texidermied squirrel that reveals some of the craft behind specimen preservation.

Environmental issues subtly beg questions via moth and butterfly collections, shark’s teeth, extinct birds, changing sea life and geology that shows Manchester’s transition from desert 270m years ago to tropical paradise and then frozen landscape in the grip of an Ice Age.

Everything from lichens to endangered animals highlight how extreme weather and habitat destruction have affected evolution. “It’s extraordinary to look at the footprints on these fossils and think of these massive reptiles stomping round in the water and mud in the north west,” says David.

“We really went through rapid climate change – from African to Arctic conditions, sometimes in people’s lifetimes – in as little as 100 years.”

Nature’s Library concludes with a collection of Canyon Diablo meteorite samples which reveal the world to be around 4.5 billion years old. The glimmering green rock is easily the oldest specimen in the gallery, and one of David’s favourites.

“I’m a geologist,” he says. “So for me it’s that part of the collection. But there really is something here to fascinate everybody.”